Filename: 04_BD_WOASS_Ch03.txt

02/18/2002


As the only one of the girls who hadn't been directly seen by the unknown
robot that had infiltrated the Knight Sabers original Headquarters - she'd
gone to bed by the time Priss was shooed out of the operating room - and
the only one that both professed to care about what she had at her
apartment and hadn't even been able to drop by and grab the most important
things before being hustled off to the new HQ, Linna had been allowed to
try to recover some things from home. It was going to be run like a
full-blown infiltration op, though, with her hardsuit and the rest of the
team standing by in the freshly repainted Knight Saber van to monitor
things and jump in if it looked like being a trap.

She was currently clearing her memento shelf into a box, while Mackie
packed up her computer and took the parts down to the truck. She'd already
put in the framed pictures she had, from happier times with the Kurosawas
before relations turned bad, and carefully put the yellow stone ball -
she'd later had it mounted on a wooden paperweight base - which Uncle had
left for her in the box beside them, before lifting his picture off the
shelf. His always somewhat puzzled-looking eyes gazed out of the frame at
her, one of the footings of the Eiffel Tower behind his hair, greying at
the temples but still thick enough to need a --

"Hey Linna, I'm done with the computer. Sylia says we'd better hurry it up,
no point in taking chances even if it has gone OK so far." She jumped in
surprise as Mackie's voice broke into her thoughts. "Say, who's the guy?
Another boyfriend?"

Setting the picture gently in the box, she replied, "Hardly. That's Uncle
Hibiki - well, not really my uncle, he found me in the woods as a toddler -
who raised me until he was caught in a rockslide. That's it I guess, just
the umbrella behind the door and we can go. You should probably take the
box, it's lighter and I'm the one who works out all the time."

"Nah, I'll be okay... Jeez, Linna, it feels like this thing is solid
steel!" Mackie had nearly lost his balance under its unexpeced weight; it
was blued metal but made in the style of a classical bamboo umbrella. He
hefted it with both hands and winced slightly as it settled onto his
shoulder. "How can you use this thing?"

Face tight, Linna stepped swiftly out into the hall, saying only, "It is.
And ... I can't yet."

Pulling the apartment's door closed and hearing the locks click home,
Mackie peered after her confusedly. "I'll never understand girls..." he
muttered.


Bewilderbeast Studios Present

BUBBLEGUM DISASTER

Season One

WISHES ON A SHOOTING STAR

A work of BGC fan fiction by ClassicDrogn


Chapter Three, Part One


Continuity note: Upset at how conventional a BGC fic this has been so far?
Well, fasten your seatbelts, we're about to take a hard left at
Albuquerque. We'll still be driving the Knight Sabers' truck, though.



The light of a wide screen display gleamed off the glossy finish of an
antique F-1 racer in the darkened office of Brian J. Mason.  A huge
bodyguard slouched in the guest chair, legs crossed, while an attractive
assistant operated the computer terminal driving the big screen, reporting
occasionally in a quiet, monotone voice.

The man himself was pale, even more than his usual tone, and the grey cast
of his skin was accentuated even further, seeming almost leaden despite
having also lightened a fair amount. His hair too had lightened, as had his
eyes - though they were mismatched, one silver to match his hair and the
other gold. Most notable was the change in his stature, even sitting he was
nearly a foot taller, and his pinched, acerbic face had lengthened and
filled out to an almost gender-ambiguous beauty. He no longer looked like
his father had when he'd held this position... The cold look in those eyes
was still the same, though, and the superior twist to the lips.

"Truck number two has been stopped by a Highway Authority vehicle for a
spot-check. The BU-12B cyberdroid is activating now," the assistant
reported. The main display highlighted the buma's position as its telemetry
came online.

Mason frowned slightly, and asked, "Is it proceeding with its programmed
objectives?"

"The cyberdroid has broken free of the truck... it is proceeding towards
the ring line and the designated drop zone," she replied impassively.

"Very well." Mason's face returned to its unreadable mask, and he asked,
"Which buma is it?"

Answering and reporting in one, the assistant said, "The type BU-12B
cyberdroid equipped with 45mm bazooka and machine gun, according to
internal sensor signals has crossed the ring line at point B towards Tinsel
City." Her fingers continued tapping rapidly on the keyboard, pulling up
the buma's layout and other supplemental information to flash briefly onto
the corners of the map as it continued to update, and a secondary viewer
showed the received optical transmissions of the unit. "It's at point K
through 266 and is engaging the 6th AD Mobile ... The Knight Sabers have
also engaged the unit, having deployed from a rolling van. The van has left
sensor range..."

---=- + -=---

No sooner had Linna gotten everything into the van, than Sylia had her suit
up in case they were attacked leaving the area. She'd done so, then
retrieved her umbrella from the corner where Mackie had gratefully dropped
it. *So light like this... like Uncle  always said his seemed.* She took a
careful swing at the air in front of her, mindful of the van's limited
space. Respecting her contemplative mood, the others just watched as she
laid it across her armored knees and bowed her head, deep in memories.

--=--

A child's voice, in the forest.

"You'll see, Molly, I'll do it just like Uncle this time! He'll be so proud!"

Soft cloth in her hands, and the lump of a stick where a corner is tied to
it. Throw! A yellow square whirls through the air followed by two more.
Crossed sticks hold them flat as they swing wide of a broom set up as a
target.

"Oooh... Well, I'll try it again. You never give up with just one try,
right Molly?"

Spinning, spinning yellow...

"Aww... Okay, I'll try it once more Molly. Just for you and Uncle."

A yellow square stuck in the bristles of a broom, and a child's laughter.
Suddenly a pair of huge, strong hands sweep her off the ground and spin her
delightedly in the air, before closing in for a hug. Uncle talking to her
with pride in his voice.

"Hey, good shot Linna! You'll catch me up in no time now!"

Happiness dimmed, as she remembers everything Uncle can do, and how he can
just use the bandannas on their own.

"I'm sorry Uncle... I had to use sticks to make them fly..."

"That's okay Linna. I'm proud of you anyway, and I'm sure Dollie Molly is too."

"Oh, she is! But Molly wants to play now..."

"Go on then and play, you can practice some more another time."

--=--

A bit of dampness formed in Linna's eyes... She never had learned to throw
the bandannas without frames, even if she did eventually come to enjoy
Uncle's unusual method of woodcutting.

A loud curse from Mackie and screeching tires brought her back to the
present as the van lurched sideways, bouncing onto the sidewalk and back to
the street.

Clinging to the overhead hand-strap, Priss hollered, "MACKIE! What the
hell's going on out there?"

Still fighting the fishtailing van, Mackie spared a moment to answer. "Some
new type of buma just flew down the middle of the road - it's headed toward
the Tinsel City area!" Finally getting the vehicle stabilized, he added,
"Looked like some kind of combat type with  a heavy weapon-arm... I don't
think the ADP's going to have an easy time with this one."

At this, Nene tensed up. "Combat type? Oh no, we've got to help them!"

Settling her helmet, Sylia agreed, "Yes... and if it's heading toward
Tinsel City, it's also heading toward the Lady 633 building. It may be that
we beat out an assault team by minutes at Linna's apartment. We'll use the
jump jets to deploy from the van. Mackie, you drop us off and then get out
of the area - the armor on this vehicle is no good against anything more
than pistol fire."

"Right sis. I'll monitor the commnet, of course. Hold on for now, I've
gotta turn around before we go past the roadblock ahead." So instructing,
Mackie hit the brakes again, and spun the wheel to skid the van sideways
and around in the limited space left before the roadblock the ADP had set
up to get traffic out of the combat zone. Putting the pedal down, he zoomed
back after the buma, the overpowered van managing to keep it in sight as it
headed for the cordon position the 6th Special Mobile Unit had set up back
the way they'd come.

---=- + -=---

Tora and Hiryuko walked along the sidewalk arm in arm, looking a little
depressed. "You know - " they both started to say, then smiled at each
other. He held her closer for a moment, then said, "We'll find her. You
couldn't just let that soul wander the Realm Between, after all."

His companion looked up at him, and replied, "I know we will. We'll find
Linna soon, too, but it's hard not to put our daughter first. It's been so
long since we last saw her..." She paused midsentence, her attention drawn
inwards, while the man's gaze shifted to the huge brown buma flying down
the far side of the highway.

"Whoa, that looks like trouble," he stated, then noticed his wife's
distraction. "Hi-chan?", he asked, before catching the same feeling she
had. "She's here! And getting closer fast!"

Hiryuko nodded, then pointed to a moving van speeding down the other side
of the highway. "She's in that truck... and so is Linna!"

Without another word, the couple turned toward the street and leapt,
bouncing off the roof of a passing bus and then from light pole to light
pole in pursuit of the van.

---=- + -=---

As soon as the police line came in sight, Mackie swung the van again and
the Knight Sabers, all riding on the roof by this point, used its momentum
to spring ahead on their jets.

The big, vaguely crablike buma was painted dark brown, with a pair of
sensor booms extending from its back for wide-field depth perception, its
right arm a large bore rocket propelled grenade launcher with a coaxial
machinegun. It was hosing down the ADPolice with machinegun fire as it flew
towards them, their riot armor doing little against the anti-vehicle rounds.

Nene felt her gorge rise as five of her fellow officers were cut down, the
powerful rounds dismembering them in a bloody spray. "I think I'm gonna be
sick," she whimpered.

Priss was more pragmatic, advising "Be sick later, we don't have time now!"
as she leapt to the attack, using her palm blaster right between the buma's
sensor booms during a break in the police gunfire and leaping away as the
few surviving officers opened up again. No one on either side noticed when
a pair of stray rounds, that probably would have just bounced off her
armor, were suddenly deflected in mid-flight a half dozen feet away from
the flipping singer. Unconcerned and for all she could tell undamaged, the
buma blew the 6th Unit's APCs out of the way with a pair of bazooka rounds,
then continued on its programmed course.

Holding onto her stomach with all of her will, Nene set to work patching
into the ADP radio channels, so the Sabers could allow for the police's
actions. Just as she succeeded, the 6th Unit commander reported, "This
thing is kicking all kinds of ass - the Knight Sabers are here and even
they don't know what to do with it. I'm engaging the K-11s!"

Hop-skipping with trails of smoke from their thrusters, the Knight Sabers
followed, catching up rapidly when the buma confronted a pair of the blocky
ADP K-11 Armored Trooper suits parachuted in from a hovering cargo
heliplane. The ADP pilots quickly brought their own machine guns to bear,
but the buma blocked with the shield built onto the outside of its
weapon-arm. Lifting off on its thrusters again, it headed further down the
street, only to be slammed into the ground as Linna used her knuckle
bombers on the same spot Priss had fired her palm blaster. The effect was
more noticeable this time, one of the sensor stalks jarring loose, leaving
a gap at its base. She gave it a solid swat with the umbrella she'd
forgotten to put down in the excitement, knocking the stalk further out of
alignment before leaping away. Not giving the buma's repair system time to
recover, Nene used her laser - weak, but plenty strong enough to sever the
electronics once the armor was breached - to disable the sensors on that
boom completely, firing at the peak of a jump to get the right angle, then
getting swatted away with a careless backhand swipe of the buma's normal,
left arm as she tried to get a kick or two in herself.

With their firing line clear again the K-11s opened up on the distracted
buma, damaging the main set of optics built into the leading edge of its
carapace and causing a secondary explosion that blew its left arm off and
threw the buma through the windows of a shop. Righting itself in the
crushed remains of the Silky Doll display counter, it calculated its
options. Deciding additional cover would be desirable, the buma fired a
bazooka shell at the back wall of the shop, collapsing it into the lift
shaft beyond, and another to blast the exposed lift doors open, revealing a
wide hallway to the rear of the building.

Bouncing through the hole left by her store's main display window, Sylia
ordered, "All of you get clear and keep the ADP from moving into the
building. Mackie, are you there?"

Over the commlink, he replied, "Of course, sis. I'm parked in the Circle K
lot five blocks west of you."

"That doesn't really count as getting out of the area," she scolded, "But
never mind now. I'm going to disable the buma so it won't escape, you stand
by on the demolition trigger!" Catching up with the buma near the middle of
the hallway, Sylia activated her energy saber and sank it into the buma's
back, bracing her other hand against that wrist and using all of her
momentum to cut a wide gash down the buma's rear armor where it couldn't
reach her.

Mackie protested while she fought to keep her grip on the thrashing BU-25B.
"Sis? SIS! You can't be serious! I know you planned it as a contingency,
but --"

Springing away again as it tried to crush her against the wall, she
replied, "Not now, Mackie! Just wait for my signal!" The white Saber fired
a hail of shots from her blasters to make it shield its main optics again,
then vaulted over it one last time, a final blast entering through her
earlier slash and destroying its hip actuators. Crippled, the buma fell to
the floor and scrabbled around with its remaining weapon-arm. It got itself
into position and fired a pair of rockets, forcing Sylia to dodge up the
lift instead of continuing on out the front of the store. One of the
grenades did so however, knocking away the K-11 that had just stepped into
the ruined shop despite the best efforts of the other three Sabers, while
the other impacted on the wall of the lift shaft and chased Sylia up with a
fireball. Seeing the roof of the shaft start to break from overpressure,
she gave it a few blasts herself, then dodged the remains and commanded,
"Blow it now, Mackie, I'm clear!"

--=--

At the communications console of the Sabers' van, Mackie sighed and flipped
up the cover on a switch with yellow and black warning bars around it.  He
held the toggle against its spring for a few seconds, while a red indicator
beside it flashed, then released it again when the lamp burned a steady red.

--=--

Dodging the K-11 that had just gotten blown back out of the Silky Doll,
Priss activated her external speaker again. "I told you not to go in there,
you idiot! Saber White's got a plan, and it needs you AND us clear!"

Turning and brandishing the suit's gun pod, his partner warned her, "Now
listen, you! You might take out the occasional buma, but you're still just
a bunch of mercenaries, and the Commissioner would be just as happy if we
took you down as well as the buma. This is *our* job, so --"

He was cut off by the rumbling explosion as the white-suited Knight Saber
escaped trough the roof of the elevator shaft, a rumble that increased
instead of dying down. The other three Sabers blasted off on their jets to
join her as she trailed smoke across the sky and touched down on top of the
building across the street, surprising the bare-chested guy and his
girlfriend who'd been watching the fight before it moved indoors. In the
street below the ADP pilot backed his K-11 as fast as it would go, as every
window on the building was blown out, one floor at a time from the ground
up. The street seemed to be crumbling out from under him and it didn't look
like he'd make it until a dark blur - or maybe two - with a suggestion of
red and blue, grabbed the shoulders of his suit and knocked it further off
balance, all three vanishing into a blue-black hole in the air. A huge
cloud of dust arose as the building seemed to slump back and into itself,
then toppled into the pit of collapsed underground levels, along with the
sidewalk and part of the road. Fortunately the effect stopped short of the
buildings to either side. For a minute or two, the dust covered everything,
lit eerily from within in the gathering darkness. As it began to settle it
become obvious what was causing the light - the fires of a ruptured gas
main that had formerly supplied the building's heat, now shooting a gout of
fire onto the pile of twisted metal and rubble that was all that remained
of the formerly multi-storey building.

Nene didn't bother with anything more than making sure her back was turned
to the rubberneckers as she tipped her helmet up and made use of a large
potted plant to finally let her stomach have its way, though she wasn't
miserable enough not to be surprised as the normally tough Priss joined her.

Linna kept a hold on the man and woman's shoulders, making sure they faced
away from the incapacitated Sabers, with the advice, "Don't worry about it,
just think about the reaction next time you have a party up here and tell
the story of the time the Knight Sabers hurled in your shrubbery."

Sylia, for her part, leaned against the waist-high protective wall around
the building's edge to catch her breath, and tried to wipe soot from the
explosion off her optics. *I was a fool to try that alone,* she thought.
*That thing almost had me several times... but I couldn't risk the others
with the building rigged to blow.* What was worse, that she didn't even
dare think to herself, was that her coordination had felt a bit... off...
in a way she hadn't been since going through her teens.

As Priss and Nene slipped their helmets back down, a blue-black hole opened
up in the air on the far side of the rooftop patio, and the wrecked parts
of a K-11 suit fell out of it with a clatter, most showing rather rough
edges, as if "cut" with a small but essentially blunt object moving with
great force. After they'd settled, Tora and Hiryuko stepped out, carrying a
quaking ADP mecha pilot by his shoulders. As they let go, he dropped and
kissed the floor, as if overjoyed to be back in familiar surroundings. Tora
cleared his throat in the way people do when they're trying to get
someone's attention, and the pilot eeped, then scrambled into a corner and
pretended to be unconscious. "I didn't see nothin!" he proclaimed. "I don't
see nothin', and I won't see nothin'!"

Linna, Priss, and Sylia took ready positions, while the bystanders -
sensibly enough - chose to finally flee into the building proper. Nene, on
the other hand, just stood there, completely open and unguarded. "Momma?
Poppa?" Her voice was tiny, barely audible even over the hardsuit speakers.

The man with blue hair and the woman in red, matching Nene's own, stood
just as dumbfounded for a moment. Finally, the woman broke the silence,
saying, "Really, Kireko. If you're gonna be a fighter you can't let your
training slip - you coulda' dodged that monster's backhand when you were
five!"  Her tone held nothing but love and longing, regardless of the
words, and the hardsuited Nene rushed into her arms, both squeezing tight.

Oddly enough, it seemed to be Nene who felt it more, despite her hardsuit.
"Ack, Mom, easy! I have to breathe, you know... Oh, I don't care, just
never leave again!"

Linna had startled when she heard the woman's voice, and the dream of two
nights before came back to her. Before she could say anything, though, the
ADP heliplane lit up the patio with its spotlight, and the 6th Unit's
commander could be heard over the bullhorn ordering them to surrender and
lie face down. "We've gotta get out of here!", she gulped.

"Right," Sylia agreed. "Linna, you and Nene go north, Priss and I will go
south. Lose the ADP and then meet at the Circle K west of here. You two do
whatever you want, as long as you don't get caught," she told the two
strangers over the exterior speakers. "I don't know you, but it looks like
Saber Pink does, and that's reason enough to trust you for the moment.
Knight Sabers, GO!"

To the surprise of all the girls, but especially to Nene, Hiryuko picked
her up hardsuit and all and took a few running steps before bounding away
to the next building with a springing step from the patio's retaining wall.
Tora was right behind, and Linna had to scramble to keep up, thrusters or
not. Sylia and Priss stared in shock for a moment, as the ADP officers in
the heliplane above apparently did as well, then jetted off south as
planned, easily leaving the stunned police pilot behind.

"MoooooooooooOOOM! PUT ME DOWN!! Really, I'm a big girl and I can do this
just fine on my ooooOOOOOOOOOOowwwnnnn..." Nene's complaints  quickly died
down, though, the need for radio silence to avoid having their positions
tracked taking Sylia and Priss  out of range of Nene's unaided voice
quickly.

--=--

Mason smiled coldly, and steepled his hands on the desk before him. "That
will be sufficient. Recall the other units, we won't have need of them
tonight." The polished desktop reflected his face as he pondered. *Sylia
Stingray... My childhood freind. I'd never have guessed, but I should have
known. Who else could even hope to match me?*

--=--

On the roof of a building above the Circle K parking garage, Sylia paused
for a moment and looked around. Priss looked back at her, waiting to jump
down and get back to the van, visible in its new Ajax Rent-A-Truck colors
on the upper level a few storeys down. *Strange... I could have sworn I
heard someone call my name...* With a mental shrug, the white-suited Saber
motioned Priss to follow and leapt, falling on quiet puffs of her suit's
jets to land gently on the building's verge. Quickly, they crossed to the
van and entered, to find Mackie alone in the van.

"Geez sis," he chided, "I was really worried about you getting caught when
you had me blow the building... Where's Nene and Linna?"

"They may have had more trouble than we did evading the ADPolice," Sylia
replied, a worried look on her own face as well.

"We should never have let them go with those two black-coated wierdos,"
Priss grumbled. "Not when our covers have been blown, no matter how
familiar Nene thinks they are. Besides, didn't she call them her parents?
You said none of us had any family, Sylia."

The leader of the Knight Sabers shook her head. "That was what my research
turned up... I wanted to make sure none of us had family to be used as
hostages in a situation such as this. Nene's official records list her as
an orphan of the Kanto quake, but while she admitted they were false, she
also told me that her parents had gone missing several years ago, before
the quake. If they've truly returned, she may want to leave the team." To
her credit, the "no retirement but death" clause of the Knight Sabers'
charter didn't even pass through Sylia's mind - its draconian strictures
had proven too tight to live by in reality, and were freely ignored for the
most part, except in the matter of keeping their secret identities.

"Wait, what's that?" Mackie asked, piping the image from a side camera into
the video channel of the van's communications system. The missing Sabers
and the two strangers had joined them on the rooftop, appearing out of a
blue-black portal similar to the one the unknown man and woman had
originally used. Oddly, both Linna and Nene were wearing martial arts
outfits instead of their hardsuits, and the others had large bundles
strapped to their backs. Neither appeared to be overly hampered by them,
though the van rocked noticeably when first the woman and then the man
shrugged off their packs and set them inside, by the boxes of things from
Linna's apartment. The blue-haired man actually used one hand to do it,
garnering a raised eyebrow from Sylia,  as she mentally calculated how
heavy they had to be to affect the heavy duty suspension of the van that
way.

"Where on earth have you been?" Priss demanded, "And where are your
hardsuits!?"

Cringing a bit from her emotional friend, Nene somewhat meekly replied,
"The hardsuits are in their packs, but --"

Remembering Nene being carried away, suit and all, in the woman's arms,
Sylia's eyes widened at this. She knew to the gram how heavy the suits
really were, and no normal human should be able to carry one so easily...
Hiding the motion behind herself, she tapped a few keys on the van's
control console. She let Priss keep their attention, as the singer
interrupted again.

"No way! It's impossible." Stepping to the packs and crouching to reach,
she snapped open the clasp on one of the packs and pulled the flap up,
revealing Nene's pink and blue suit with the  legs detached and stuffed
into the torso for more compact carrying, plus some camping gear. Her eyes
bugged out.

"Don't do anything hasty, Priss," Sylia advised as she read the scan
results. "These really are Linna and Nene. Dental and skeletal patterns are
as exact a match as the van's sensors can determine, though their muscle
mass has increased slightly and energy levels are a bit higher than I'd
normally expect." The dark-haired Saber looked at her wayward team members,
and the still mysterious people who had joined them in the back of the van.
She addressed this latter pair as she continued, "Linna's arm also appears
to have been broken and healing for about a month, which I know is not
true. You've already defied what conventional physics and Dykstra field
theory can explain with those portals of yours, and I think it's about time
you tell us exactly who you are and what you want."

Just then, an ADP Firebee flew slowly over the parking garage, still
looking for them. Loath though he was to miss the conversation, Mackie
figured it would be better not to be around if the pilot made a second pass
over this location, and started up the van, heading for the downramp. He
still kept an open ear to the back of the van as he headed for a small
warehouse Sylia owned, a prearranged place to take the team if they had
unknowns with them, after having had to deal with the Cynthia situation.

Brushing a bit of bright blue hair out of his face, the man began. "I'm
Tora Kagami and this is my wife... well, pretty much, Hiryuko."

"We're Nene's parents, who's really named Kireko," Hiryuko added. "Nene was
kinda a nickname since she loved making cat noises when she was little and
we weren't used to not having... nevermind, that's not important..."

Picking up the break, Tora steamed ahead with, "So anyway, all we really
want is to be with our daughter again and keep an eye out for Linna here
since her dead friend asked us to be her Guardian Spirits. See, we're both
half-spirit duplicates of a guy named Ranma Saotome who turned into a girl
sometimes and got his reflection caught by this cursed mirror, which sucked
the closest spirits into itself and remade them into mirror-clones of any
mortal that looked into it. But we don't change sexes ourselves, and we
dropped a couple other curses in the process too, so we're better than the
prototype."

Hiryuko nodded happily, and took up the story again, regardless of the more
and more nonplussed looks on Sylia and Priss's faces. "After we got used to
being on this world, thanks to some lessons from Ranma, we decided to leave
so the people out to kill or marry him -"

"Or both," interjected Tora. Nene slid into the seat at the communications
console while her parents continued.

"-Or both, yeah," Hiryuko acknowledged, with an annoyed look, "wouldn't tie
us up in their own troubles. Of course, we found plenty more of Pop's
stupid deals he'd run out on to make more problems on our own. Then we had
Kireko and settled down a lot, only going on training trips for a month or
two at a time, and makin' sure challengers knew better than to try it when
she could get hurt."

Irritated himself at the next set of events, Tora frowned as he finished
off, "Then a buncha stupid Shinto priests trapped us in a temple for ten
years just when Nene was gettin' old enough to really start training, and
we only just got out and found her again when the temple got bought and
demolished. I think they said something about a new Genom spork factory or
something, but we didn't really stick around."

The two of them shared another look, to see if the other had anything else
they thought was relevant, then nodded together and smiled at Sylia, who
had her arms crossed and one eyebrow practically climbing into her
hairline. "And you expect us to believe all this?" she asked.

"Huh?" asked Hi-chan. "Why not? That kinda stuff happens to everybody,
doesn't it?"

Having reassured herself that rediscovering her past hadn't made her forget
everything that was normally important to her, Nene noted, "Well, not
really Mom. Most people only have one or two little things happen and
forget about them, I think, like seeing a UFO." Nene pointed at the
console's screen, which showed a European-style sailing ship silhouetted by
the rising moon as it flew across the sky. The patrolling ADP Firebee
entered the frame, wobbled noticeably as the pilot saw it, and then flew
right back the way it had come. Priss simply switched her disbelieving
glare from the Kagami elders to the screen, while Sylia and Linna blinked,
and Tora and Hiryuko quietly wondered if Kirin and the Seven Lucky Gods
martial artists were on the prowl again. The van turned into a warehouse
parking lot, then went through the automatically opening door, cutting off
the view before any more could really be said about it however.

"Since it's getting a bit stuffy in here, why don't we take this to the
meeting room?" Sylia suggested as the van pulled to a stop. "It's the set
of temporary partitions set up just beyond the warehouse office section,
there."

--=--

They made for a decidedly odd-looking group sitting around a table that
could fit in an executive boardroom, two women in powered armor, two in
training outfits consisting of black slippers and pants, a quilted red top
with the kanji for "stormy air-dragon" on the back, and dark blue arm and
leg bands. Linna had kept her usual yellow bandana while Nene opted for an
elastic sports headband to keep her hair out of her eyes. Tora and Hiryuko
looked almost normal, in black dusters over similar outfits, though
Hiryuko's top was blue. Priss kept her visor closed as she slouched into a
chair in one corner of the room, where she'd have a clear field of fire -
scans or not, she still wasn't convinced these were the real Linna and
Nene, let alone about the Kagamis. Sylia kept her visor closed as well, but
stood at the head of the table, unobtrusively turning on the recording
devices as she resumed the conversation.

"_Even if_ I can accept your outlandish... *magical* origin story, that
still doesn't explain Linna's arm, or how you could carry their hardsuits
easily in a backpack, when each of those suits weigh about the same as they
do."

Linna rubbed her left arm through the sleeve of her Chinese-style shirt,
and noted, "Actually, that's probably even more unbelievable, Sylia..."

---=- + -=---

Linna barely kept up with the Kagamis as they roofhopped, even with the
jumpjets in her hardsuit. It was unbelievable! At least the woman - Nene's
mother? She'd said she was looking for her daughter when she'd met Linna in
her dream - had put her down, and seemed to be giving her pointers on
jumping without using the jets.

"Ya know," the man called out, "We could just slip into the Realm Between!"

"That dream world?" Linna asked, letting the speakers amplify her voice.

"Yeah!"  answered Hiryuko. "Let's do it, Tora!"

She bounded ahead, to the far edge of the building they were crossing just
then, and opened another of the blue-black portals in the air just beyond
the ledge around the building's roof. "Everyone in!"

Nene had put on a burst of speed as well, trying to keep up with her
mother, and couldn't stop in time to avoid the weird-looking disk. "Wait,
yeeeek!" she protested as she skidded the last few feet before tripping on
the ledge, and falling headfirst into it. Tora was much more graceful,
jumping easily over the side of the building and into nothing, while
Hiryuko stood beside the open portal, maintaining it.

"I don't like this much, but I'm not going to leave Nene alone just yet,"
Linna muttered. She cast a quick glance over her status displays before
jumping through herself, quickly followed by Hiryuko. Unattended, the hole
in space shrank down to a point and vanished.

--=--

Tripping through the somewhat oily looking hole to the Realm Between, Nene
found herself falling along a cloud bank, spinning end over end. A few
quick bursts of thruster-fire put a stop to the second problem, but while
she couldn't feel any wind resistance the wispy grey tendrils of mist kept
sweeping past her at an impressive clip, her spin having halted with her
body in something like a skydiver's position, legs bent at the knee, arms
at an angle to each side of her body. There was no ground in sight, the
grey of the cloudbank darkening to fade into the black of the sky beyond
some immeasurable distance above, below, and to each side. It stubbornly
refused to show up on the suit sensors, as well, in fact they were all
blank - radar, lidar, loran, gps, everything but direct optical apparently
out of commision. "Whoa, this is realy wierd," she whimpered to herself,
the sound of her own voice reasuringly normal as it echoed back through her
hardsuit audio system. Wondering where everyone else had gotten to, she
scanned around, desperate for more information on this strange environment.
For just an instant, she was sure she'd heard someone calling out to her,
and she strained her eyes, her ears, trying to find anything but clouds...

Suddenly her perspective shifted, and she wasn't falling past a vertical
wall of mist, but flying above it in a silly sort of kneeling position.
Almost as soon as she thought it, Nene leveled out into a classic
superheroic flight pose, almost the same as the diving position she'd had
before but with legs straight and head raised to see ahead of herself.

Wait, what was that? Off to her right, a patch of color shone against the
darkness. Again without thinking about it, she steered towards it, then
wondered how she'd done such a thing. Only a moment later, she was upon
it... a faint smear of colors and motion, ethereal and almost too faint to
see. Again, she thought someone called to her... looking around again for
the source, she saw that the flickers of color sliding past were gaining
definition and solidity, to the point she could make out shapes, and a
babble of sounds tickled at her hearing.

She was flying past - through - worlds. A sorceress tossed an explosive
spell at a group of brutish looking humanoids in furs; two businessmen in
tattered suits fought a desperate sword duel with beams of light; a woman
in some kind of space fighter blew up fighters with the Genom logo on them,
then swooped down on a huge space station, like Genaros written on the
scale of a moon. Cynthia waved to her from the back of a horse in the
middle of a galloping herd, as they raced across a huge field with the new
Knight Sabers base in the distance, and Nene happily flew closer, waving in
return. There was a slight tug at one ankle, and the field slipped away
from her... Lost in wonder Nene willed herself to greater speed, trying to
catch up, but this wan't a plain, it was some forested mountain region...
she noticed that air resistance had returned, and she could feel gravity
slightly, despite still continuing levelly on over the treetops.

"If I can feel gravity, shouldn't I be falling?", she wondered, as she
paused in the air. "waaaaaaAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHHH! I DIDN'T MEAN IT!", she
screamed, as she suddenly fell.

--=--

"What's wrong with Nene?", Linna asked as she arrived in the darkened
landscape, mist hugging an unseen floor at mid-calf height, sky
impenetrably black but somehow still lighting everyone evenly, if dimly.
She found Tora seemingly doing a magic trick, pulling a glowing red string
from his right hand and gathering it in a coil in the left. Just in front
of him, a slightly faded-looking Nene tumbled head over heels in midair,
then leveled out in a crouching position with her maneuver thrusters.
Oddly, the jets made no sound, and Nene didn't seem to see them when she
looked around after Linna called her name. She faded out more, and Linna
realised that she could actuallly see the tendrils of mist through her
fellow Knight Saber, as she shifted position again, to something like a
classic flying posture familiar from flying dreams the world over.

Hiryuko joined them in the mists of the Realm Between, and grumbled
something unintelligible as she took in the situation. Raising her voice to
more normal levels, she stated, "Let me guess, she's gone dreamwalking on
her own, instinctively."

"Uhuh," Tora confirmed. "She's definitely your daughter, all right. A real
talent for spirit travel." Even as he spoke, he made an odd gesture with
his right hand, and the end of the glowing string appeared, as a loop.
Spinning it like a lariat, he cast and snagged it around one of Nene's
ankles, even as she faded still more, the coil of line playing out with a
sudden eagerness as she faded entirely away, stretching and zipping to a
vanishing point like a starship's special effect for going to FTL. The cord
itself settled down and fell to the mist, somehow floating on top of it as
if it was as solid as a fluffy pillow, instead of a mere cloud of vapor. It
trailed off into the blackness, the end lost in distance.

"What happened?", Linna demanded. "Where's Nene!?"

"It's a little complicated," Hiryuko explained. "Being physically present
in the Realm Between is different than comin' here in a dream, or even as a
restless soul after death. It looks like Nene's tapped into her spirit
legacy instinctively now that she's actually here, and she's entered a
dream world of some kind or another... normally that's something you do
from the Spirit Realm or Mortal Realm, so when the dreamer wakes up you
just pop back to yourself, but being actually present whatever world Nene
ends up on will be stabilised and permanent until she leaves, if it's not a
stable subrealm all on it's own. That means we have to try to track her...
fortunately that's no problem with the link Tora made, but once we travel
it we have to find out where in the Realm we are before we can get out, and
that's going to take some time."

"Oh no... How long?" Linna asked. "If we don't get back soon Sylia and
Priss will start searching for us, and that could be trouble with the ADP
all over, cleaning up from the buma rampage...."

"Probably a couple weeks," Tora answered, "but don't worry, it'll only be a
few minutes in the Mortal Realm- it's like time in a dream."

So saying, he and Hiryuko each took one of Linna's arms in an acrobat's
grip, then Hiryuko folded her right hand into his left so that they both
seemed to be holding the thin, glowing cord. "Get ready," she warned,
"beacause here we GOo._"

The red cord suddenly pulled taut, snapping off of the mist and vibrating
like a bowstring. An instant later all three of them warped and faded,
vanishing just as Nene had. The mists swirled as they always did, but left
no wake behind them.

--=--

No sooner had Nene pulled herself out of the conveniently hardsuit-shaped
hole she'd landed in, than she felt a tug at her ankle again, and tripped
back in. "Owie..." she complained. "I wonder where this is? It doesn't look
like anywhere I've ever been..." Sitting up again, she was startled to see
her parents and Linna fade quickly into existence and fall in a protesting
heap by her feet. She briefly noticed a loop of red between the Kagami's
hands and her ankle, but it vanished before she could catch more than a
glimpse, and she dismissed it as a trick of the light.

"Are you OK?" she worried, helping to lift Linna off the top of the pile,
so her parents could get up.

"I'm fine, Nene, but what happened to you? You were just hanging in midair
like you were flying..." Linna asked.

"Oh *yeah*! It was so much fun Linna, I was really flying, without my suit
jets or anything!",  the pink saber enthused. "I even saw Cynthia too
somehow, but I lost her when I came here."

---=- + -=---

Eight days had passed, and the Kagamis had set up a campsite with their
traveling gear, sharing one tent while Linna and Nene took the other. The
hardsuits had been shut down and made as compact as possible, then put
under a tarp with the firewood. They'd relocated a couple miles from their
entry point, to the base of a cliff near a babbling waterfall with a pool
suitable for bathing. Each day, Hiryuko would spend three or four hours
trying to sense their 'position' (for lack of a more accurate term) in the
Realm Between, before exhausting her energy and joining in the physical
training.

Tora had conjured training outfits for the two Knight Sabers, since their
softsuits were both a bit uncomfortabaly revealing and the sensors too
easily damaged to use them for training in, so all four were decked out in
chinese-style tops and black pants with black slippers. He'd also
discovered on the first day tht Linna's chi flows were incredibly tangled
and confused - it was a wonder she could move at all, let alone be a
passable martial artist.

Naturally, Linna had protested this description... untill he'd walked over
to the cliff face and carved the life-size image of a tiger in it with
invisibly fast finger-strikes. He'd done what little he could to smooth the
flows out, and she was still ahead of Nene... but the lead was rapidly
closing. For her part, Nene had mainly regained the skills she'd had at
six, which would likely rate her a blackbelt or two in most arts, but was
merely the foundation as far as her father was concerned. The same
near-eidetic memory, focus, and learning curve that had served her so well
in learning computer skills allowed her retrain lost reflexes and learn new
refinements, now that her body was mature enough for real training.

It had also come to light that she was only fifteen. That she had, in fact,
just TURNED fifteen as of a few hours before.

---=- + -=---

"WHAT!?" Priss fell out of the chair with the force of her own shock. Even
Sylia sat down hurriedly in the chair she'd slid out of the way behind her.
"Nene CAN'T be fifteen! I mean... Just look at her!"

Nene's face twisted into the fiercest expression anyone had ever seen her
wear, as she leaned foreward and demanded, "What's that supposed to mean,
Priss? I'm an early developer, and if you're jealous because of how I look
you're not half the person I thought you were!"

"Now just a damn minute!", the blue suited Saber protested. "That's not it
at all! I just don't like putting a kid on the firing line! It's the same
reason Sylia doesn't let Mackie join us on missions!"

If anything, Nene's scowl got even deeper. "Don't call me a kid, *granny*.
I do everything the Knight Sabers need me to, AND hold down a real job,
unlike SOME people!" Noting Sylia starting to get back up, she turned to
the leader of her team. "And don't you start on me either! YOU picked ME,
not for my age, not for my looks, for my skills. Have I let you down at
all!?"

"..." Swallowing shock at Nene's outburst even more than her revelation,
Sylia tried again. "... No, Nene, you've performed your duties as the
communications specialist on our team admirably. It's just..."
Uncharacteristically, she was caught without the words to express herself.
She sighed, and tried it one more time. "In the months you've been with the
team, you've done very well, even your combat skills have gone up
appreciably. It's just a shocking thing to find out, that's all."

This brought a more familiar happy grin to the youngest Saber's face,
though she was still tense. "If you thought I was getting better before,
just wait'll you see what Mom and Pops have been teaching us! Hurry up
Linna and tell them about our fight on the last day!"

"Can I at least get done with the part I'm at first?" A nonplussed Linna asked.

"Oh, go ahead. But you'd better tell the truth when the time comes or I'll
have to tell it!"

Mackie, still watching from the truck while keeping an eye on the security
monitors, muttered over and over, "Fifteen... she's fifteen... two *years*
younger than me..." Unnoticed, a trickle of saliva ran down from a corner
of his gaping mouth.

---=- + -=---

"WHAT?!" Linna didn't quite fall over from the force of her own shock, but
it was a close thing. Without the balance training she'd been doing, she
undoubtedly would have.

"What," Hiryuko asked, "I can't wish my little girl a happy birthday?"

"Yeah Linna, what's the matter with that?", Nene protested.

"But... but... You're in ADPolice! They don't HIRE fourteen-year-olds!"
This wasn't the first thing Linna had thought of, but she didn't want to be
rude.

"Pshaw, that's nothing a little record hack couldn't fix. I knew I'd have
to do something to earn money or I'd be in trouble fast after I left the
orphanage, and if there was anywhere safer than ADP headquarters  I
couldn't think of it."

Still trying to disbelieve, Linna asked, "are you sure about this?" Her own
somewhat mysterious past made this less of a foolish question, to her mind
at least, than it might otherwise seem.

"I think I'd be unlikely to forget the date," Hiryuko interjected. "It was
somewhat memorable at the time, after all."

Giving in, Linna smiled ruefully, and suggested, "You should have just
applied at a certain lingerie shop, Nene. It would have been just as safe
and faster in the long run... Oh well, happy birthday. Sorry I don't have
anything for you."

"Oh, that's okay," Nene replied ingeniously. "It's only been a few minutes
back home, remember? I turn fifteen again in a few days! And how many
people get to say that?"

Shifting the topic, Hiryuko stated, "It looks like we might be able to get
back soon; I almost had an answer yesterday when I had to stop."

"That's great news, Hi-chan!" Tora had stayed quiet up to that point,
watching the byplay as it happened. "We've really gotta get someone to look
at Linna's chi and get it straightend out, it's holdin' her back like
crazy. For now, though, it's time to train."

--=--

The girls were suprised when Tora called a halt to their solo practise
after two hours of basic to intermediate katas - since neither of them were
yet capable of the aerial stunts required for advanced ones - as they
normally kept that up until Hiryuko had called a stop to her scanning for
the day and the one-on-one instruction would begin.

"You've been training now for just over a week, with the best two martial
artists in Japan," he began, "and we can see how much better you've gotten.
But, since you've only been working against the best, I'm not so sure you
realise how much you've improved, espescially you, daughter. So today,
you're gonna spar with each other instead of me and Hi-chan."

Both Knight Sabers blinked at this, and gave each other questioning looks.
Nene was the first to respond. "Aw pop, do I have to? Wouldn't a little
more practise first be a good idea?" Thoughts of her last training
simulator run weighed heavily on her mind.

Reassured that he was right, Tora held firm. "Yep, you have to. Linna's
your freind, right? She ain't gonna hurt you much."

Taking ready positions, Linna winced, while Nene muttered, "That wasn't
very reassuring..."

Knowing she'd be waiting all day if she waited for Nene to make the first
move, Linna opened with a simple straight kick to Nene's side. To both of
their suprise, Nene danced automatically out of the way and into position
for a couple of quick punches, the first of which even connected lightly
with Linna's own lower torso, just below the ribcage.

Jumping back with their eyes wide in suprise, both Sabers reassessed the
match. Linna adjusted her position slightly to take strain off of that
muscle group for the moment, to allow it to recover. This time, Nene took
the initiative, with a feinted punch to the same spot followed by a kick of
her own, which was deflected efficiently before Linna grabbed her
still-extended arm and pulled Nene further off balance. Leveraging the
redhead into a throw, Linna took a moment to brush the spiky black hair
back from her face where it had escaped her bandanna, and was suprised
again when a rebounding Nene nearly got her with an uppercut.

Dodging, Linna somersaulted backwards and pushed off Nene's chest as she
went, knocking her down for real this time, but the taller girl was too far
out of position to take advantage. On her feet again, a much more confident
Nene charged at Linna, only to spring aside at the last moment as she got
ready to counter with a judo-toss, but still wasn't quite fast enough as
Linna got in a sweep kick and forced the young redhead to jump over it,
rolling to her feet almost immediately, even as Linna was already moving
for a knee to the abdomen before Nene could get her guard back up...

It was at this moment that Hiryuko finally figured out thir Realm Between
position, and with that the forces to use to open a portal to somewhere
else. Her cry of success distracted Linna just at the critical instant...
as Nene threw her.

Neither of the girls had realised how close they'd gotten to the cliff
face, having been so intent on the match, and Linna had just time enough to
bring an arm up to protect her face before she slammed into it with a
sickly crunch.

Nene's face drained at the sound, and she sped over to help her freind sit
up. "OhmyygoshI'msosorryLinnaIdidn'tmeantowillyoubeokayI'msorry I..." Her
babble cut off like a switch had been thrown as she helped Linna up and saw
her left forarm bending in the middle. "DADDY!!"

---=- + -=---

"Is that accurate enough, Nene, or do you want to tell it again?

"I meant the part before, Linna.. I really am sorry about your arm; it was
just an accident..."

---=- + -=---

Tora was already right behind her; he nudged his daughter out of the way
and examined the break. The skin wasn't broken, and (after applying a
nerve-deadening pressure point) feeling it cautiously revealed it to be a
clean break, so with a pull and a slight twist he reset the bones, and then
used a basic healing spell on it - the only one he could manage, generally,
since Hiryuko tended to be better at them than he did - but it sufficed
admirably to repair the break  as he held the arm in position, giving it a
few weeks worth of healing instantly.

Just in time, too, as the pressure point began to wear off, and instead of
searing pain Linna felt only a slight ache. "I'm here, and I saw you
conjure these outfits," she wondered, "but it still didn't quite sink in...
You really are magical spirits, aren't you?"

Joining the group, Hiryuko answered, "Yeah, we really are. AND, I've
finally found our way out of here! Let's get packed up and go!"

--=--

>From the ledge of an inaccessible cave opening on the side of a mountain
three miles away, a western-style dragon that had abandoned the Mortal
Realm until the silly humans got done playing with their new toy,
technology, snorted as he saw the somewhat amusing half-spirits and their
unusual companion leave his little domain by way of a fairly standard
magical portal. He'd have to tell Gaderaseth about them when she came over
a bit later... but there was time for a nap first, she wasn't due for a few
thousand years. He yawned mightily, and tucked his snout under a foreleg.

---=- + -=---

"I think you were right, Linna, that was even more unbeleivable," Sylia said.

"No kidding," added Priss. "NENE threw LINNA? Now that's unbelievable."

"Hey, that's not nice..." Nene pouted.

"Maybe you'd like to try your luck against her?" suggested Tora.  "As a
martial artist, it is of course her duty to accept any challenger."

Behind her helmet, Priss cast a doubtful look over Nene, who was torn
between irritatedly agreeing with her father or arguing with him over the
'accept any challenge' thing. For all that the others could only see the
singer's helmeted head cocking slightly, the intent was still clear. While
Hiryuko merely looked on, bemused, Tora's challenging glare intensified
until the air between himself and Priss seemed to crackle.

*You'd think she was insulting his own abilities,* Sylia thought. In an
attempt to lighten the tension, she broke in with, "I suppose it's too much
to hope that there might be some kind of external corroborating evidence of
at least some of this?", her tone halfway between entreaty and resignation.

"I've got some family photos, and the Kagami name is still on the national
register," Nene suggested.

Sylia nodded, then wrapped up in a resigned tone, "To tell the truth, the
most compelling aspect of your story is the number of supposedly impossible
things you've demonstrated doing it; if any of our enemies had such
capabilities they would use them more directly. Still, we will need to talk
it over as a team. Would it be acceptable to meet us again here tomorrow at
this time?" Even as she spoke, Sylia's agile, analytical mind was
postulating defences agaist those "impossible abilities"... the most
difficult part of any radical new technology, as she well knew, was simply
believing it to be a possible goal, and finding some avenue of approach.
There HAD to be a predictable, duplicatable theory behind the ability, it
was simplty a matter of finding it and exploiting it in reverse. Something
about the well-known Heigelmann Inconsistency in Dykstra's equations
tickled her forebrain in light of these new observations and the
force-blasts that Priss's strange visitor had used.

Tora looked ready to balk again, but Hiryuko beat him to the punch by
agreeing. "Yeah, I guess it's only fair," she said dissappointedly. "I'll
see you tomorrow, Kireko. Linna, don't let her slack off, I want you both
to train tomorrow with the katas you've learned and against each other."
Pulling a smile back to her face, she continued, "Try to keep each other
intact this time though, OK?"

Nene, flustered, simply groaned at her mother, while Linna acknowledged,
"Yes, sensei!"

Satisfied, or at least as well as she could be being seperated again from
her daughter, Hiryuko concentrated and opened a portal in the air behind
their seats as she and Tora rose, then the two stepped through it and away.

In Sylia's mind, a four-dimensional field graph sprang to life, tensors and
vectors shaping it one way, then another, starting from the known patterns
for particle beam focusing fields and progressing to pure kinetic force
projections, but never quite reaching the solution to pull open a seam in
reality, or to keep one from opening. For just a moment she was motionless
as visons of scientific sugarplums danced in her head, but the Sabers'
leader soon shook herself back to the here and now. She and Priss finally
slid the visors of their helmets up, all four team mates sharing
questioning looks.

Linna was the first to speak, breaking the silence. "Sylia, I think you
should know... Hiryuko told me they'd tracked Nene and I down by our
personal energies," she began. "Reconstruction of Megatokyo after the Kanto
quake may not be finished yet, but it's still one of the most densely
populated cities on the planet, and they found us here in two days after
getting just a trace of a reading. We were together in that dreamland for
over a week... I doubt there's anything we could do that would keep them
from finding us again, alive or dead, or that we could keep them out of
anywhere they truly wanted to be." She shook her head with finality,
continuing, "They could walk right through any conventional defenses. Tora
carved a nine foot long image of a tiger in solid rock, using a single
figer, in under a second; even a buma would have trouble doing that. It was
nothing to him."

"They've really got you sold, don't they?", Priss snorted. "This is so full
of bullshit they're shoveling it in Hong Kong... Sylia, why are you shaking
your head at me? You can't actually believe this crap too?"

"As I said, Priss, the very impossibility -" Before the white Saber could
even finish the sentence, the singer cut her off.

"Damn, you too!? Fine, have fun telling tall tales to any more random
wierdos you meet, I've got somewhere to be." Giving no time for anyone else
to protest, Priss marched out of the meeting room, making only the breifest
of stops in the partitioned off equipment area to climb out of her hardsuit
and change into a set of her usual motorcyle gear before hopping onto her
new motoslave - stashed here for this operation to be closer to hand if
something went wrong- and gunning it out onto the highway.

"This *can't* be a good thing, can it sis?", Mackie asked over the
still-active sound sytem. It wasn't really a question.

"I'm afraid not," his sister confirmed. "Keep a close ear on the scanner,
Mackie, if any more buma show up tonight before she returns we'll have to
assume they're after her and scramble to intercept. At least she did take
the motoslave, even without her hardsuit to link to, its independent combat
mode should be enough to escape or destroy even a small group of buma as
long as she can give it commands."

After taking a moment to consider this, Sylia took on a stern aspect, and
commanded, "Nene, I think it's time you told me your real history."

The redhead looked a bit subdued as she accquiesced, "Okaaay. It's not
really all that different from what I told you originally, though, except
for my age... My parents were always going on adventures, one at a time,
which would last a month or so before they came home. They'd promised I
could go too once I was six, but then they dissappeared one day when I was
about five and a half - I don't remember that exactly of course, but that
was when it happened - and after a couple of days when I went to borrow
some peanut butter from the nice old lady who lived next door she reported
it to the authorities, and I ended up in an orphanage... I was always sure
that they'd just gotten caught up in a real adventure instead of a normal
training trip, like they said used to happen to them all the time, and that
they'd come back someday. Eventually I discovered how much you could do
with a computer, and I ran away froim the orphanage because...
b-because..." Nene's head lowered, and a teardrop fell to the polished
tabletop. "I was an early bloomer... and there was this older boy there,
who said he was going to... you know... as soon as I turned fourteen. I
made up a false history and set myself up as a a new transferee to the
ADPolice records department, because if they could stop a buma, surely they
could stop Akito. I ran away on the night before my birthday. It was just a
couple of months later that I found your system, Sylia, and you know what
happened from there."

Linna moved to take the pink Sabers' shoulders in a hug, and Sylia too
stepped around the table, taking Nene's hand in her own left, gloved, hand.
"I'm sorry, Nene," she apologised. "I had no idea..."

Sniffling, and after a wipe at her eyes, Nene smiled feebly up at her.
"It's okay, Sylia... It didn't happen, and now that Mom and Pop are back I
think I can finally get over it... but that's why I was so upset the first
time I caught Mackie peeping." Her eyes widened as she suddenly realised
that he'd been listening in all along with the teleconferencing equipment,
and no doubt had just heard everything she'd thought she was telling just
to the other women.

The same thing apparently occurred to him as well, because his voice came
through the speakers again. "I... I'll be good from now on, Nene," he
promised. "I won't chase underage girls. Um, if it makes you feel any
better, you had me fooled too, I never would have thought such a great
looking woman was two years younger than me."

"Thanks Mackie... I guess." She wasn't entirely pleased to be thought 'too
young' for anything, and compulsive peeper or not, Mackie was kind of a
sweet boy... but there were some things that SHE wanted to choose the time
for, and if being 'too young' protected that, well, 'too young' would do.

--=--

Anger mostly cooled by a bit of hard riding, Priss pulled into the parking
lot of a toy store... She knew just the thing Sho would like for his
birthday, and if Sylia and the others could palaver with two total
unknowns, she could see a friend and her son on his sixth birthday, and
secret identities be damned.

---=- + -=---

It was nearly midnight, and Sylia was only now going to bed after having
stayed on alert with Linna and Nene until Priss had returned to the new
headquarters, still annoyed at them and refusing to elabortate on where
she'd gone, but cooled off enough to be civil at least. Now, as the
dark-haired woman laid back on her bed, the whirl of recent events pressed
in and paraded across her mind's eye... so very much had changed, gone
wrong, or been revealed in such a short time... and she had the sinking
feeling that things would only continue on that course.

*Sylia Stingray*

Her eyes snapped open... she had been sure she'd heard someone call to her
last night, and now, without the noise of the city in her ears, she KNEW
she'd heard it. The only problem was that there was no-one whose voice
sounded like that in the entire compound.

*My childhood friend, and now my enemy. Could you be capable of these
changes as well? All the rest of us have vanished.*

Her mind raced, but no coherent thought lasted long enough to visualise.

*Where are you hiding out, now that your business, and I suspect your
headquarters, is gone?*

*WHO!?* Finally, a concept that stayed in her mind, for the first time
since she'd heard the strange, echoing voice.

--=--

*HOW CAN YOU KNOW!?*

Brian Mason, leaning far back in an easychair in one of Genom Tower's
executive suites, froze as a woman's voice intruded on his musing. His hand
dropped from where he'd been playing the little metal beads on the
fingertips across his chin, and he looked around the room, all attection
focussed on finding the intruder. Recieving no response, he rose and
searched the room, then called for Security to look for hidden devices.
He'd had a long day already dealing with the aftermath of some stupid
have-not who'd run back into a collapsing apartment building with her son,
so he didn't stay to hear the results, instead just taking a different
suite for the evening.

--=--

The unknown voice stilled, Sylia lay awake a while longer before drifting
off to uneasy dreams, of the Genom Basic Research Division daycare center
she'd spent so much time at right after Mackie was born and their mother
died.

---=- + -=---

A day passed, and the Sabers had once again gathered in the meeting room
area of Sylia's warehouse. Priss had only reluctantly agreed to come to the
meeting without her hardsuit, but after seeing Nene reach Level Seven in
the holographic training simulator, while Linna cleared Eight easily and
even squeaked through Level Nine, had convinced her at least that the
Kagamis could be valuable physical trainers, if noting else.

Sylia had spent the day delving into the computer networks, confirming as
much of the Kagamis' story as possible, and had come up with as much
verifying information as was likely to be available to find. It wasn't
really enough to satisfy her, but at least nothing had set off warning
signals.

Nene had for once enjoyed the time in the training simulator, blowing away
her old performance benchmarks easily, though she knew she'd only cleared
Level Six with a lucky hit that was little more than a desperate attempt to
keep her balance after dodging than a true attack. It got the job done,
though, even though Level Seven had wiped the walls with her. Soon she'd be
just as good as Priss, the Apewoman herself!

Linna too was riding high, having beaten her long-time sticking point at
Level Seven and lucked through Nine as well, though not quite so flukily as
Nene had beaten Six. She'd gone out to the horse field and run there, while
Mr. Akimoto and Cynthia rode a trotting Yoko beside her as well, for a good
half-hour before rejoining Nene for their warmups and sparring... She
actually hadn't had to pester the redhead about it at all, after a week of
the routine, and with the prospect of showing Priss that even if her "good
looks and amazing brainpower" were the pink Saber's main stock in trade,
she could pull her weight in a fight too.

Mackie was again monitoring the warehouse security systems and listening in
on the conference room from the van, but Cynthia had also joined him there
- Mrs. Akimoto, her usual caretaker, weasn't feeling well this evening, and
he'd offered to keep an eye on her while the meeting went on.

At almost exactly the same time they'd left the previous evening, Tora and
Hiryuko returned, stepping together out of one of their usual portals, both
bearing serious, even foreboding expressions. Knowing that both of them
tended to be easygoing, Nene immediately asked, "What's wrong, Mom? Pops?
Has something happened?"

Hiryuko just bit her lip, while Tora answered, "Yeah... something really
big happened. You've been summoned to an audience with Kami-Sama. All of
you," he added, looking around at all four Sabers, "Plus the boy and the
girl in the van. He sent us to come get you. Um, if you'll come of course."

"It's generally a good idea to come when Kami-Sama says 'come', though,"
Hiryuko noted. "I'm sure ya can see why."

Nene immediately rose to join her parents, while Linna turned to look
questioningly at Sylia , and Priss simply stood, flabbergasted at the
audacity of these strangers.

"How?" Sylia whispered, then cleared her voice and asked "How did you know
she was with us?" She *knew* that there was no telemetry signal coming from
the buma-girl - for some reason the transmitter had been implanted in one
leg, and they hadn't replaced the half of it left after Priss's emergency
amputation, for obvious reasons.

"*He* told us," was Tora's answer. "It's not the kinda thing He's in the
habit of doing but He said it's important you all come... we were going to
take Linna and Kireko anyway, since our daughter is family and He has to
approve it for us to really be Linna's official Guardian Spirits instead of
just friendly unnofficial ones."

Priss stepped foreward, angrily. "If you think you can just pop in here and
get us to gallivant off after you, you're ... arg, Sylia, tell them!"

Sylia still hadn't stopped staring at Tora, nor did she break her gaze as
she asked, softly, "Whose voice did I hear?"

Hiryuko muttered, "Had to ask the question He gave us the vaguest answer
for, didn't you?", while Tora rolled his eyes and sagged slightly. "We
specifically can't tell you eactly who, you have to figure it out
yourself," she continued, "But you get a hint: It's someone you were very
close to long ago, but your lives led apart."

It was Sylia's turn to bite her lip for just a moment, unnaccustomed
feelings of indecision wracking her.

"Sylia...", Priss began again, only to stop when the Saber leader raised a
hand for silence.

"What were the other answers?" she asked.

Hiryuko knit her brows for a moment, making sure she remembered them
correctly, then replied, "42, Andy the Invisible Anteater, and 'Both,
depending on how you define 'together''. At least, that's the order He
listed them in."

Sylia closed her eyes and nodded. then spoke quietly but firmly. "Priss,
we're going with them. Even if they aren't who they claim, if they have
such a good model of me that they can answer the most inobvious questions I
can think of before I ask them, they already know or can easily discover
anything they need to about us."

Priss started at the note she heard in Sylia's voice... something she'd
heard in her own once, just before she'd been recruited to what had
previously been a solo crusade. "Sylia..." she repeated, worriedly this
time. If the cornerstone of their organisation broke... Bound up in her
thoughts, she didn't protest any further as they joined Mackie and Cynthia
at the van, and only hesitated slightly before stepping through the double
portal the two Kagamis had opened, a foot-wide strip of the Realm Between
visible between two fringes of blue-black as they stepped onto a mountain
ledge where the sun was still perhaps an hour above the horizon, a gravel
trail leading to the valley below where they could see a large garden based
in a hedge-maze. Going further up the mountain, it led to a temple or
palace of some kind, which had apparently suffered some disaster recently,
as its main dome was wreathed in wooden scaffolding, which numerous workers
were climbing over.

A moment later, the nature of the disaster was revealed, when Cynthia
gasped, "This... this is my empty place! I can't see us in the
sky-pictures, even though they're looking right at me! Oh no, someone might
have been hurt when I made the satellites shoot here instead of at you!"

Tora's eyes widened at this, and he stammered for a moment before getting
collected enough to instruct, "Ah... yeah. Come on, we need to walk to the
Palace."

--=--

Despite the steep slope, the path was well maintained and the climb was
brief. The workers had vanished as well; there was no one in evidence
inside or outside the beautifully designed and apointed palace as they
entered, even when they passed right through one of the areas being
repaired, until they came to a small bedroom much more humbly laid out than
the rest of the building, where a beautiful woman with long, light brown
hair was adjusting the bandages on a young man, and helping him lie back
down on the one, small bed. As the group spread out around the bed, she
moved back to a chair and sank into it, apparently exhausted.

For his part, the man had the classic slavic features, and when he spoke a
trace of a Russian accent snuck in every now and then. "Good... good, you
are all here." he greeted them. "I do not think there is much more time."

Sylia's mind felt numbed, like the whirl of her thoughts, of events pushing
her along, had left her dizzy. She'd noted the surroundings, the small
comments the others had made, but the only fully realised thought of her
own since she had ordered her team to come here was, *This is Kami-sama?
The highest authority is an injured man in a small, plain bedroom?* She
hadn't spoken aloud, but he answered her anyway.

"Heh, yes, I am the Kami of this world, and Ranger of the North. Piotr
Grigorevich, lord of all I survey. Heheh..." His muted laughter turned into
a hacking cough, but after a moment he was able to continue. "Is it not a
delicious irony? For one hundred years I have been God, and I gained the
power at the same time my homeland became atheists. Ah, but many of them
continued to believe, when the political officers were not looking, and
many looked away because they, too continued to believe. But you are not
here to hear about me... You are here because you felt that everything has
gone out of your control, and you no longer know what to do to regain it.
This I can give you; the lesson I had to learn myself: The only one you
must control is yourself, and sometimes the best control to is relax and be
free, to regain your focus and renew your energy. You will need it, for it
will be your descisions, and those of your freinds, that determine the fate
of this world."

Next, he turned to Linna, who had also noticed Sylia's unusual manner and
had watched her with troubled eyes. "Your past is even further reaching
than you think, and you will find its pattern soon enough, but right now
your own pattern must be untangled. It may feel odd as I do this."
Kami-sama closed his eyes, and a knotted, multicolored grid of lines glowed
around and somehow through her, then as if by the hand of an invisible
weaver it shifted and straightened, the pulsating colors and patterns
smoothing into a steady, white glow as she floated slightly off her feet,
twitching every now and then and making faint, pained sounds that rapidly
turned to sighs of relieved tension, as though getting a really good
backrub. As the glow faded, she sank again to her feet, then stumbled to a
kneeling position. "it will take a bit of getting used to, because your
reactions are now different, but you should be fine with an hour of
practise," he told her, his voice noticably weaker than before.

The nurse who'd been tending him as they entered spoke up, saying, "Oh, you
really should conserve your energy, or ..."

He smiled at her, in a fatalistic kind of way. "This is a neccessary thing,
Bell, and conserve it or not I will soon enough have no more need of
energy... you are part of the cycle of things, you know even better than I
that even Kami-sama passes from your custody to your older sister, before
another may pass from your other sister to you."

Her expression still troubled, the nurse sat back down, as Kami-sama's
attention shifted again, to the Kagami elders and their daughter. "Tora,
Hiryuko, you are officially appointed the Gaurdian Spirits of Linna
Yamazaki, her get, and her line. You may protect the innocent and the
helpless, and teach your art to all who are worthy, and conduct youselves
as you otherwise choose, but you may not join the battle directly with her,
or your daughter, or their companions, because they must overcome their
challenges alone if they are to succeed at what must be done."

"We understand, Kami-sama," Tora acknowledged. "Sometimes ya gotta take the
hits, or you won't be tough enough for the next fight."

"Kireko, to you I must apologise," he continued. "Your childhood was
difficult, as was the shared childhood of your parents, and because you too
are half-spirit, any child of yours will also have, at best, an unusual
upbringing. It is the Spirit Mark of your line, along with the brightly
unnatural hair coloration, for so long as you walk the Mortal Realm. In
exchange, you are gifted with enhanced memory and physique, and will not
age unless you choose it. It is not a bargain of your making, but it can
not be changed."

"I remember the stories Mom and Pop told about the bargains Grandfather
stuck them with... if it doesn't leave me with half the people on the
planet wanting to kill or marry me, or sometimes both, it's not so bad by
comparison," Nene explained. Despite the glib answer, she seemed
contemplative as he moved on to Priss.

"For you I can do almost nothing, because you will accept almost nothing.
There is room for almost nothing in you but anger, your only exception your
friends and your music. I give you then almost nothing, but perhaps you
will find some use for it." Holding out a single finger, he formed a faint
soap-bubble ball of energy, that glowed softly like the promise of dawn
just below the horizon. It floated towards her gently as he lowered the
finger again.

Ignoring Bell's shocked gasp, the suspicious singer looked at the
slow-moving sphere doubtfully, then asked, "What is it?"

"It is the light which never fails," the bedridden man replied cryptically,
before lapsing into another coughing fit.

"Looks like a soap bubble," Priss noted, poking the drifting ball. It
popped, leaving a slight dampness on her finger that faded almost
immediately. "Never fails, huh?", she smirked.

"It is the light of hope," Bell said softly, as she came back to the
bedside, and laid glowing hands on her patient. "When times are at their
worst, people will be able to look up to you and take courage. I knew when
my younger sister began to learn fighting arts that there would be terrible
struggle in times to come, but it will be your touch that gives everyone
the will to carry on through them. It is a very precious gift."

Priss's own lyrics ran through her mind then, with ironic meaning.
*Tonight, a hurricane, touch me, hurricane, show me your love with your
touch! Burning touch!* She looked at the fingertip that had brushed the
bubble, uncertainty in her eyes.

Stabilized again for the moment, Kami-sama spoke again. "Mackie Stingray,"
he began. "You would accept almost anything from me, but you will find
almost everything you need on your own, in time. Instead, I must ask you to
do me a service. You need not, but it will make certain matters easier in
the future."

"O-of course, Kami-sama," the younger Stingray agreed. "Anything I can do,
I will..."

"Thank you... There are seven magical artifacts I would like you to keep
safe for me, until the next Kama-sama arises. I have gathered them already.
Bell, the bag?" Taking a sturdy leather pouch, closed with a strap and
buckle, from his nurse, he opened it, and laid out six fist-sized yellow
stone balls and a small, detailed statue of a coiled dragon. "There is
another of the balls in the world, but it is safe where it is," he
instructed. "When I die, these will lose their power, but it will return
with the next Kami-sama. When that happens, it may be that there will be an
immediate use for them, or perhaps you will simply be able to return them
and be done with their burden. Until then, keep them always safe." He
returned the items to the pouch, and rebuckled it before passing it to
Mackie, who slung it over a shoulder.

"That leaves only you, little snowflake," he said gently to Cynthia. "It is
true that it was the beam you diverted away from your freinds that struck
me down, but it is in my power to forgive you that, for you did not know
the harm, and sought only to protect. You fear turning into a monster, and
are soon to outgrow your appearance. Both things I can fix for you, if you
too will do me a service."

The little blonde buma, who had, to that point, half-hid shyly behind
Mackie's leg, pursed her lips, and looked around at her freinds, and at
Bell, and at Kami-sama. She stepped foreward, and took the hand he'd
offered. "I... I'll try to help," she offered. Usually big people had just
told her to do things, before she'd met her new friends, and she still
wasn't used to being asked for her opinion.

A glow built around Kami-sama, and extended itself to surround the
buma-girl as well. it brightened, and her clothes and hair seemed to be
buffeted by an unseen wind, even as small loose objects nearby levitated
and began to drift around the room. Bell's eyes widened as she saw what was
happening, recognising the process but knowing that its normal purpose
would be impossible for this girl. The others looked on worriedly as
Cynthia seemed to split into a double image, separating into two
transparent copies of herself, identical but for one having slightly more
golden hair than the original and the other mirror-bright silver. The dual
images seemed to swirl for a moment and flow back together... then it
became obvious that somehow while the human-looking outer forms were indeed
merging, an orbiting shell of mechanical parts were accumulating in the air
around the re-formed Cynthia. They too flowed together into a somewhat more
compact form, and suddenly sprouted a covering of short black and white fur
even as a V-shaped red ornament formed on the chest. A circlet of bare
metal with a single oval citrine mounted in it swooped down from the cloud
of levitating objects to land like a crown on the round head, now becoming
very recognisable in form, if not purpose - a slightly ornamented toy
panda, perhaps two feet tall.

As the light show died down, and the many small things hovering about
dropped to the floor, Kami-sama let out an exhausted sigh, and explained,
"Normally that spell is used to separate out any remaining evil from
someone who is to become Kami, but without malice in your heart I was able
to use it instead to recreate you, Cynthia. Your body will grow like a
normal little girl, as will your mind. Huggy Mazinbear will always be there
to protect you and keep your secrets, and help you to decide when you are
torn between two paths." His breathing grew ragged, and his face paled. "My
time... is short. I must pass the Heart of the World, as it was passed to
me... Cynthia... you cannot merge with it, but when the time comes, you
will know the one who can... On that day... you will know what must be
done..."

While the little girl stood, rooted in fear, he drew the sheet covering him
away from his chest, and beams of light broke through gaps in the bandages,
before a glittering, multifaceted crystal, glowing with blue energy and
several inches across, rose out of his chest as if rising out of a
cloudbank. He cupped a hand around it, and held it out to the little girl,
who took it in shaking hands, somehow holding it despite her fingers never
coming closer than an inch to its surface. The weight of the huge gemstone
forced her to hold it close to her chest, and it sank away out of sight
almost immediately. Oddly, Bell, Nene, and her parents seemed to blank out
until it was safely hidden away again.

Seeing this last thing done, the former Kami-sama let his eyes close, his
hair rapidly turning steely, then grey, then stark white as his features
aged decades in the span of seconds, his face becoming gaunt and withered,
as the century and a half since his birth would normally be due. His chest
fell a final time, and Bell sadly pulled the sheet back up to his chin, the
peaceful expression on the ancient face seeming merely asleep.

"I will give you transport back to Megatokyo," she informed them, "as the
Realm Between is unlikely to be safe for travel for a few days. It is
usually shaken up for a bit when the Heart changes bearers. Please, follow
me." She turned away quickly, but not so quickly that the tears overflowing
down her cheeks went unseen. Still numbed from the proceedings, the whole
group trooped obediently after her, Huggy Mazinbear trundling along on
stubby panda hindlegs while Cynthia held its forepaw.

---=- + -=---

Sylia had slept poorly that night, dreaming again of her childhood only to
wake around 3AM and be unable to go back to sleep. Suddenly, the dreams and
the voice she'd heard connected in her mind, and she slipped a robe on over
her nightie before heading to the computer room to do some investigating.
*An old childhood friend... Wiz Daycare... Someone once close to me, but
now living a different path... it fits! But who? I never knew their last
names...*

She didn't really want to believe that one of the children who'd been her
best freinds at five was now a mortal enemy. Genom was dirty, without
question, but the majority of its operations, and employees, were
above-board and blameless. It was the main reason she hadn't just hired
mercenaries herself, and set them to outright destruction of its assets -
it wouldn't have been any more expensive than creating, building, and
maintaining an entirely new, advanced technology and personally leading a
group of her own in damage control operations until they could find a way
to cut out the rot without hurting the (relatively) innocent. She knew,
she'd looked at the numbers before starting construction of the first
hardsuit.

--=--

Some hours later, Priss too rose, and wandered drowsily into the common
kitchen area, almost identical to the one in the old headquarters even to
the bay windows, though these faced west overlooking the Ishioka horse
field rather than Genom Tower. The singer had risen from her own uneasy
dreams. It wasn't so much that she'd had three of her least favorite
nightmares in succession, but somehow, just as they got to the point she'd
normally wake up in terror, that stupid little soap bubble would drift
through the scene, with one of her songs audible in the background, and
then whatever was the terror in the dream would turn out to be some wimpy
thing she kicked the shit out of easily... Even the nightmare she'd had
after the Aqua City fight had turned into her just wearing that robot-suit
in a stereotypical 'flying dream.' She muttered a greeting to Sylia, who
didn't seem to notice, then poured herself some tea and grabbed a newsfax
printout, hoping for something to take her mind off of lame magic tricks
that messed with her head.

Somehow, "WOMAN AND BOY KILLED IN RECONSTRUCTION ACCIDENT" wasn't what
she'd been hoping for. Her knuckles turned white as she began to read.

'Ayane Nakagi and her son Sho lost their lives today when they ran back
into their former aparment building, scheduled for demolition and
replacement by new management. Work was already underway to knock down the
structure, and the two were crushed under rubble from the floor above.
Genom executive Brian J. Mason, who was on the scene, had this to say.
"Truly a tragic accident. Genom will of course cover the funeral
arrangements, though I understand she had no other surviving relations."'

"*Mason.*"  They both spoke the name at once, Priss angrily, Sylia sadly.
"*This ends now!*" Realising what they'd just done, the two Knight Sabers
blinked at each other in suprise, then traded bundles of paper. Sylia read
the headlines, then sadly shook her head, seeing only confirmation of what
her research seemed to have discovered. Priss scanned the summary of the
records of a dozen Wiz Labs (Later absorbed by Genom) employees' children
from 2010, as they all came to suspisciously young ends, except for Sylia,
Mackie, and Brian Mason, but didn't see the relevance, beyond the low
survival rate. She looked up quizzically as Sylia lay down the newsfax and
sighed, "Oh, Brian..."

"Sylia, that man is going down," Priss warned. "Don't try to stop me."

"No, Priss," the dark-haired Saber began. Seeing the singer's expression
close again, she continued, "We do it as a team. You get Linna and Nene,
while I check the modifications on Linna's old motoslave and the
adjustments to their suits. We move immediately."

--=--

*Mason...*

Startled, the pale, silver-haired man looked up from the improved superbuma
design he was working on, the voice that had disturbed him two nights
before echoing again sadly in his ears.

*This ends now!*

Not his ears... The internal diagnostics that he'd only just learned to
call up reported that there was no unexpected waveform coming from them.
Instead, it seemed to be... A communications system of some kind.

*How interesting,* he thought quietly. Noting that no outgoing signal was
indicated as he did so, he smiled coldly. He'd realised Dr. Yoshida had
been monitoring some form of augmentation process after the pain had left
and he regained coherent thought, and certainly the metallic beads on his
fingertips suggested something of the sort, but the full extent of the
changes still were unclear to him... He "pushed" at the status report,
trying to make it cover everything.

"Very interesting indeed," he murmured. "If my old freind and her allies
are coming to meet me, it would only be polite to greet them."

Quickly, he typed some instructions in his terminal, to have all but a
handful of the Security buma clear the access road up the side of Genom
tower for a certain set of armored ladies, and had a buma released into one
of the districts that Genom was looking to accquire to draw off the
ADPolice. Only one more thing remained... He raised a hand, and sighted
along it to the large viewscreen on the far wall of his office, then
triggered a mental command.

As shards of the shattered screen rained down over his antique racer, the
laughter of a man who'd recieved his dearest wish rang through the office.
A wave of the same hand with outstretched fingers, and a matching wave of
lightning leapt from his fingertips to ground itself on the frame of his
expensive toy, and soon flakes of scorched paint joined broken glass
littering the floor.

*Come then, if you wish to be struck down like dogs!*

--=--

>From the terminal hooked up to test points on Linna's hardsuit, Sylia bowed
her head and sighed, then continued adjusting its programming to compensate
for the quicker reactions its pilot had demonstrated in her most recent
simulator runs.

Unnoticed in the shadows, the small, spiderlike form of Guardian 215's
infiltration mode scurried over to Priss's new motoslave, the green visor -
configured as an optics turret in this form - glowing slightly as it
scanned the unit and its attatched cannon. A significant improvement over
the previous model that had been destroyed, but altogether insufficently
armed, with that combustion powered slug-thrower. The faint sound covered
by the clicks and ratcheting of the Knight Commander replacing maintenence
hatches on one of the Knight Companions' personal combat suits, it extended
cutting edges and sliced away the offending peice of artillery, keeping
only the barrel for camoflage and stuffing the rest of the weapon's peices
into shuntspace as it shifted and flowed to replace the body of the weapon,
hanging from the side of the cycle-form motoslave as if nothing had changed.

---=- + -=---

The blocky grey mass of the Knight Sabers' semi rolled through the early
morning dark, the road fairly clear in advance of the morning rush hour.
The side bay doors opened as it took the exit to the Genom access road, and
Priss and Linna, on their new motoslaves, rode the extendable arms out to
be dropped off, speeding ahead of the truck to clear a path. A moment
later, the pink saber, in a newly repainted motoslave, followed suit, but
shifted to battleframe mode and flew close cover for the truck instead of
ranging ahead, while the white saber jumped out of a hatch in the roof of
the trailer and landed in a crouch a few feet back from it, waiting for the
moment to go into action.

Priss and Linna rolled up the long, spiralling access road on the lookout
for Genom security, but oddly enough there didn't seem to be any in
evidence for nearly a minute. Then, a pair of BU-12Bs, the same type of
buma that had wrecked the Silky Doll and had been buried under the Lady 633
building, flew down the road to attack. Priss popped a wheelie and rode
over one, as she'd ridden over a blue buma on a regular motorcylce not too
far in the past, while the second caught Linna with an outstretched arm,
knocking her from the motoslave's saddle as it passed. She recovered
quickly, jetting high and spinning to face backwards as her new motoslave
shifted to independent combat mode to catch her, firing over its shoulder
at the BU-12 that had tagged her, while the other circled through the sky
to catch up to Priss.

As the motoslave came to a stop, Linna leapt out of its arms, freeing them
to unsling its cannon and take a shot at the buma, blowing its shield arm
out of position, allowing her to jump in close and kick it off balance,
pushing off from its chest to leap high and use her knucklebombers on the
upper shell. She had planned to aim for the base of the eyestalks, like the
first time, but suddenly a place on the curved carapace of the head, a few
inches back from the edge, seemed to light up like a bullseye to her, and
she slammed it there instead. The knucklebombers went off with their usual
jolt,but unlike the last time she'd used them on one of these, instead of
just rattling it and springing a seam the entire top of the carapace
crumpled in, cracks radiating from the impact point, cuncussion and
internally spalling armor chips destroying its brain. Dead, the buma
dropped, and Linna rejoined her motoslave, linking to it in battleframe
mode before taking to the air and flying to see how Priss's battle was
going.

--=--

"Leon!" Daley Wong called to his partner from their squadcar, where he'd
been monitoring the radio. "There's some kind of running firefight on the
side of the Genom building, hardsuits versus military buma!"

"Hardsuits!?" Turning from where three K-11s had cornered the rogue combat
buma and were hosing it down with their vulcans, Leon jogged over to be
able to hear over the noise. "Call for one of the choppers to land on the
-", pausing for an instant, he glanced at the company sign on the side of
the intact office block behind them, "- the Nakasuma building to pick me
up. You can handle the cleanup here, we're almost through with the messy
part." As if to punctuate that statement, the buma's power supply exploded,
taking it out of commission, and the officers manning the barricade let up
a hail of cheers.

"Where are you going?", asked Daley. "Not another man, I hope."

"Can it, Daley, I've gotta check this Genom thing out." Taking the brushoff
with his usual good humor - it was as much a joke between them as anything
else - Daley watched his partner head for the entrance of the office
building for a moment before hoisting himself out of the car and setting to
work organising the cleanup and after-action assessments.

--=--

Priss too had shifted to battleframe mode, landing the motoslave and
bringing up its autocannon to firing position. As the second BU-12B flew
into sight around the curve of the tower, she fired twice, blowing off its
weapon-arm and the opposite eyestalk, before remembering that the new, high
power cannon only carried two rounds instead of the fifteen of the older
one's autocannon. "Shit, now what?" she cursed, as the buma closed in to
attack physically.

She was very suprised when the rifle's targeting display blinked off, and
the barrel dropped off of the body of the gun, but not so much as when four
slim vanes extended to replace it, and a new pipper - more of a wireframe
cylinder indicating the firepath drawn into the space ahead of her than a
normal crosshair - popped up. She snarled and did her best to center the
buma in the targeting circle, the matching diameter lock-mark on the buma
helping to line it up, then pulled the trigger, hoping that whatever the
hell was up with the rifle it would still make nice big holes like it was
supposed to. For just an instant there was a crackle of energy buildup
around the four vane "barrel", then a brilliant white beam lanced through
the buma like a pinned butterfly, melting a gaping hole around itself
before the buma's powerplant exploded. "Now that's a nice big hole," she
gloated. "Nothing like an absence of buma to make *me* happy."

--=--

Nene and Sylia landed on the top plateau of Genom Tower, Nene in the
motoslave, a few feet to the side and behind her leader, immediately
bringing up the autocannon to cover Mason and his hulking security guards -
both assuredly buma, but still in human guise. His cold smirk gave an
otherwise attractive face a menacing look, as the white-suited Saber
warned, "There's nowhere to run, Mr. Mason. You look as if you've resigned
yourself to that."

The smirk grew to a smile before he confidently replied, "what you see is
the look of the victor, here on the heights of Genom. Here where I will
rule, and where you will DIE!"

On that signal, the security buma burst out of their disguises, revealing
themselves to be 55C combat models, and leapt for the motoslave on trails
of thrusterfire, dodging the bursts Nene fired at them while keeping her
occupied so she couldn't help Saber White. For her part, Sylia found her
considerable speed to be no match for Mason, who danced around her
energised blade without getting so much as a scorch or tear in his suit
before slamming a fist into her gut, sending the lead Saber flipping
backwards to catch herself on her thrusters and fly toward the ledge of a
nearby stairwell.

With a smug snarl, he flung 0ut a hand and blasted her landing point with
an invisible wave of force, pulverising the ledge and forcing her to hang
in the air long enough to clip the wings from her flightpack with another
blast. As she fell to the floor level, he dashed over and caught the
falling hardsuit by the helmet, slamming it backwards into the wall and
using the moment she was stunned from that hit to open the visor.

"Sylia!", he gloated.  "I knew it was you! I knew as soon as you dropped a
building on my buma, and I would have found out your friends soon enough.
Ah ah ah," he scolded, catching up her weapon arm before the saber could be
reactivated. "None of that! I wouldn't want to have to get rough with my
oldest freind."

Using her weapon arm as leverage, he swung Sylia around to slam into the
wall again, facefirst, then flung her away to land in a heap.

"HaaaAAAAAH!" Mason leapt and threw another crushing punch as he landed,
opening cracks in the armor of Sylia's hardsuit.


A dozen feet away, Nene and the rather battered looking motoroid had
seperated to each take on one 0f the buma, as two-on-one they were
overmatched even with the battleframe's power. She was doing considerably
better than it was, the agility and balance improvements of her recent
training showing exceptional results, as she bounced in and out of reach,
keeping the much more massive buma too busy moving to set itself and use a
ranged weapon, while the pink saber kept tagging it with her newly upgraded
laser, whittling away until finally she broke through the thinner throat
armor and damaged its mouth laser, which exploded seconds later and blew
its head off.

Unfortunately for her, that was also about the time that the second buma
managed to catch the motoslave in a heat beam and it slumped to the ground,
joints locked and armor melting.  She caught the cyberdroid with a boosted
kick to the head before it could reorient, but had quite a bit of fight
left before defeating it.


Mason meanwhile had spread his hands like some obscene benediction and
blasted Sylia with wave after wave of electricity, waiting for her agonised
screams to die down before sending the next bolt, taking the time to
between blasts to gloat. "This may hurt a bit now..." "but you'll thank me
for it later." " You and I are two of a kind, you see." "And if that which
does not kill you makes you stronger... " "then that which comes close will
make you a god!"

Sylia couldn't do much more than thrash uncontrollably as the current
surged throught her, even though most of it merely played over her armor
and dissipated there was still plenty of juice to do the job. She didn't
even realise that he was speaking, let alone understand the words. A reedy
whine of agony escaped her throat as her back arched in pain, until with a
sickly crunch she fell silent. Mason finally relented and stood over her,
arms crossed as he chuckled.

Eyes narrowed, he spun suddenly, the sound of thrusters warning of new
arrivals on the rooftop, and he dodged aside as a pair of charged
monoribbons whistled through his former position. He grabbed them as their
cutting energies died down, yanking Saber Green back and flipping her
overhead to slam into the ground, following up with a force blast that sent
her slidng into the already battered stairwell wall.

Nene finished off her other buma and bounced past him, scooping a moaning
Sylia off the ground and jumpjetting away down the face of the cone-shaped
Tower, to the truck waiting far below. With her advanced sensors, she could
tell that the white Saber's heart had stopped, and after Sylia herself the
only one of the team with more than the most basic medical skill was
Mackie. She could only hope it wouldn't be too late.

"NO!", Mason bellowed, in his mind already a god come to earth, and Sylia
his perfect match. "YOU WILL NOT STEAL --!"

"Get a clue, you BASTARD!", Priss advised, as she and her motoslave
battleframe came at him in an awkward flying kick - even the new model was
not really optimised for hand to hand combat.

He easily dodged, and threw a boosted punch at Linna, following Priss in
from a low angle. He didn't expect her to meet it with the knuckle bombers,
however, and he drew back in agony, the entire arm a shredded ruin of torn
flesh, metal cables, and red blood, before it exploded and knocked him to
his knees.

Priss circled back up to the rooftop in the motoslave, landing beside Linna
as Mason staggered back to his feet. "Fools!", he cursed them. "Do you
think you have defeated me? All you have accomplished is to force me to use
the ultimate weapon!" Mason's eyes changed, literally with the blink of an
eye, from odd but human to the metal orbs and red lenses of a buma, glowing
ominously as he laid in a targeting solution. "Take a deep breath, Knight
Sabers!", he taunted. "It will be your last!"

--=--

After its one shot, Guardian 215 had been willing to spend the rest of the
battle riding at the ready position, still masquerading as Priss's cannon
unless further action was required. As Her Highness had accquitted herself
well enough on her own, it had remained hidden. When the signals previously
identified as controlling orbital strike weaponry began to lock onto Her
position, however, it could no longer remain passive; fond of it though she
might be the antiquated personal combat suit she was currently using was
insufficient to withstand such a weapon, and even the Guardian itself would
not escape unharmed. Flowing and retreiving much of its mass from
shuntspace, 215 invaded the control systems of the motoslave and made it
release Her, replacing the inferior mechanoid as a battleframe around her
personal unit, and extending a secondary manipulator to grab the remaining
Knight Companion and toss her out of harm's way. Her Highness herself was
too far from the edge of the target zone to make it out and became a dark
smudge in the heart of an artificial star.

Even as the beam hit, running off of a bubble of force that sprang up
unexpectedly, 215 was forming the most powerful weapon it could without a
direct request, a set of small, black, knifelike missle spines that
extended from between one set of the more conventional rail-blades which
formed a heavy gauntlet over both lower arms of its battleframe mode.
Awaiting a target lock and the command to fire, it analysed the field that
had formed around Her Highness to ward off the energy beam, and noted that
the effect was similar to the 'psychic' barriers used by some figures in
the broadcast video signals it had monitored since concluding that its
Partner was experiencing psychological distress at its presence, in an
attempt to rebuild the baseline behavioral database lost to file
corruption. However, those segments had demonstrated such wildy anamolous
input that they had been statistically excluded from the dataset, as
probable exaggeration or outright fiction. Her Highness had not been
observed to have such abilities previously, however. Furthermore, the
energy seemed to be coming from some external source, though investigation
would have to be continued after the battle.

--=--

As soon as Mason's eyes began to glow, Priss got a bad feeling, and as her
motoslave lurched and then dumped her out she got more than enough
confirmation that something was FUBAR. Before she could hit the ground, she
was snatched up again and she could feel something wrapping around her
hardsuit like a battleframe, though nothing in the Sabers inventory would
be covering her field of view. Suddenly, an all too familiar grid of
glowing yellow crisscrossed the armor that had shut off her line of sight,
and an image formed over them just as her hardsuit reported sucessful
linkage to a "Guardian Battleframe". The image was oddly washed out and
blurry, as if viewed through a sheet of water, but then the effect faded
and she realised that she'd been right in the center of a particle beam
from the satellites overhead.

"Goddamit," she growled, "Not you again, you walking scrapheap..." No
answer was forthcoming, save a targeting display bracketing the
flabbergasted Mason with a red lock reticule. "GrrrrrrrAAAGH! Fine, blast
him then, damn you, but don't wait for me to help you do it!"

Apparently that was good enough for the "battleframe" around her, because
the outstretched right arm of the battleframe glowed ever so briefly with
an energy corona as power was fed to four tiny black blades, the
space-warping feild generators within each one projecting them foreward at
close to lightspeed with no backblast or counter-reaction. The warp fields
preserved their structural integrity until they reached the Kanto mountain
range on the horizon, even Mason's reinforced body too soft a target to
disrupt them. Four stabbing fingers of friction-generated plasma traced
their courses, and the impacts each created a miniature musroom cloud as
kinetic energy was converted to heat. Fortunately, most of the velocity was
lost as the warp fields collapsed, so that even the combined yield was only
equal to a largish conventional explosive. The plasma tubes themselves were
a dangerous weapon however, spreading in an instant to bathe the Genom exec
in a firey hellstorm and scorching a wide swath across the top of the
Tower. When the plasma dispersed, amazingly, the Genom executive was still
shakily on his feet, eyesockets empty and mouth gaping in a silent scream
as the organic tissue sheathing the various technological workings of his
augmented innards burned fiercely away, four six inch holes punched through
his chest and upper abdomen.

"Dear kami..." gasped Linna. "How can he still be standing?"

"Don't ask Kami, he's dead, remember?", Priss replied. "And he probably
wouldn't know either. I know I damn sure don't."

The crack of high-caliber pistol broke their stunned silence, the impact of
the slug on his forehead destroying the nebulous balance of the standing
metal corpse, and sending it plunging over the side of the roof to bounce
and roll the thousands of feet to the Tower's base. Turning, the two Sabers
saw Leon with his Desert Eagle in hand, smoking with the traces of recent
firing as he leaned out of the side door of an ADP heliplane.

Before anything could be said, Nene's worried voice came over the scrambled
suit radios, pleading, "Hurry up, you two, we've got to get going NOW!" At
almost the same moment, a explosion on the far side of the Tower rooftop
heralded the destruction of Linna's motoslave, which had been set on guard
against more buma showing up; combined the two were plenty of incentive for
Priss and Linna to begin jumpjetting down the sloping side of the enormous
building themselves, to the Mobile HQ truck still circling on the
ground-level highway below. Everyone aboard, it merged into the stream of
similar trucks driving through the industrial district and was lost.

"Should we just let them go like that, Leon?" the heliplane pilot asked.
"I mean, they just attacked Genom Tower..."

"For now, yes." the ADPolice Inspector replied. "Because I'm more worried
about what they were fighting. Land so we can document the scene. I'm not
letting Genom sweep a new, human looking combat buma under the carpet if I
can help it." The rising sun caught on the frame of his sunglasses as he
slipped them on, moving back from the doorway of the chopper while it
maneuvered in for a landing, finding a clear area in the ongoing
construction of the already enourmous structure.

-----------------------------

Chaper 3 EX will contain the immediate aftermath of the battle, plus some
more of the sexaroids' plotting on Genaros.

-----------------------------

Damn, Ryoga's umbrella is pretty light in the future, hey? - No, that's
just not Ryoga's umbrella. It's one Linna made from the scroll he left her
describing how to, along with the sword-belt and the instructions for the
shi-shi-houko-dan, and observations of Ranma's variant on it. I have no
idea what Ryoga's would be made out of to be as heavy as it's shown in the
manga when the Furinkan students are trying to pick it up; IRL it took a
solid bar of steel three inches in diameter and two and a half feet long
before I (an average-strength highschooler at the time, or perhaps a bit
above) had to strain to lift it two-handed, and while Ryoga's brolly is
closer to a foot longer than that it's both thinner and has a significant
amount of empty space in the folds of the canopy. Maybe some lasting energy
charge technique? Anyway, since Linna was somehow provided with a more
normal childhood than the typical cast-member in Ranma 1/2, she wasn't
enough of a martial arts freak to have the strength training needed to
actually use it unaided. I know how this happened (it's a good two pages in
my plot points file), but I mean to show, not tell, especially not in the
Author's Notes.

Chasing a buma in a VAN? The Knight Sabers van is FAST, fool!

To see exactly what the portals the Kagamis use look like, get a copy of
Slayers Movie #1, featuring Lina and Naga on a 'mysterious resort island' -
the mazoku Joyluck uses the same effect.

Dykstra Field Theory: The scientific explanation of about half of Ki,
(leaving out the spiritual aspects, the "magic", that make it most useful)
which allows for the tightness of the beams of plasma weapons, the bumas'
heat rays, controlled microfusion generators, etc, and theoretically allows
for antigravity, force shields, and FTL if the math could be applied to
hardware successfully. So far, it hasn't on earth, though a fair amount of
Guardian 215's more spectacular powers use it - the concussion blasts, more
powerful energy attacks, and antigravity lift rings.

Sylia's other questions: What is the meaning of life? (42) Who was my
friend? (Andy the Invisible Anteater, her imaginary friend she never told
anyone about) Are my parents together? (They're both dead, but are buried
seperately, since Dr. Stingray was buried with his wife and Sylia is from
her previous marriage... to that rich Wayne guy, who died tragically young
and in scandal-raising circumstances. You could say vigilantism is in her
blood, though it's not any major plot element, or you wouldn't be reading
about it in the Author's Notes.)

You may wonder how Mason could be on the data cartridge Sylia's father gave
her, shooting him as an adult, if he was in the daycare center as a child
at the same approximate time. That wasn't Brian J. Mason, it was his
father, Brian M. Mason, who is also known as Sir Not-Appearing-In-This-Film.

And if you think that end battle was something, wait untill you see the
real fight with Largo in a few more chapters.

The 'rail-blade' gauntlets on 215's battleframe mode are effectively
identical to the 'headdress' on the Largobuma Priss fights at the end of
Bubblegum Crash, except of course for having a few warp blades hidden among
them. The warp blades themselves are about four inches long, 3/8ths inch at
the widest point, but only about 1/8th inch thick; they have a wasp waist
section about halfway down thier length, a crystalline nosecone, and a
narrow oval and center pip on each side of the front section that exposes
more of tthe same red-purple crystallime material. If you have ever seen
the stylus that comes with the 540 series Jornada palmtops from Hewlett
Packard, that is precisely what I am basing them on.

Guardian 215 should be imagined with the vocal talents of Susan Blu; if you
don't know her by name, she did (among other shows) Arcee on the post-movie
Transformers episodes, as well as in the movie itself. You can even keep
the flanging effect if you like, though it's not really there.

Many thanks to my prereaders: Patricia Kostan, Nathan Baxter, Hide
Hasegawa, Leong Mun Yee, and Kaitlin Coelho.

Bubblegum Crisis belongs to Youmex and Animeigo, I make no claims
otherwise. Please don't sue me, I have no money to speak of and fanfic does
more to promote your products than anything else I know of - without it, I
never would have known about anime at all, and I'd certainly never have
bought the BGC tapes based on the sucky box copy.

Ranma 1/2 I'm not so sure of, except that the creator was Rumiko Takahashi,
not me, and that I make no claims to own IT either. Likewise, Dragonball
was created by Akira Toriyama, and is distributed in the US on video by
FUNimation. I THINK that both Ranma and Dragonball comics are done by Viz
in the US, but that may be incorrect.

I haven't a clue who owns Ah! Megami-sama! except that it's not me.

-----------------------------


Seeing this last thing done, the former Kami-sama let his eyes close, his
hair rapidly turning steely, then grey, then stark white as his features
aged decades in the span of seconds, his face becoming gaunt and withered,
as the century and a half since his birth would normally be due. Bell sadly
pulled the sheet back up to his chin, the peaceful expression on the
ancient face asleep.

"Ya should leave now, or like, you'll wake him up," she informed them,
Valley Girl accent mangling the words horribly, "I'll like, cast some spell
to get you home or something, okay?" She turned away quickly, but not so
quickly that the telltale sings of censors' airbrushing couldn't be seen on
her face. Still numb from the script editing, the whole group trooped
obediently after her, Huggy Mazinbear trundling along on stubby panda
hindlegs while Cynthia held its forepaw.

Hold it! Who the hell let the FUNimation dubbing crew in here? Get those
idiots out of my studio, before I have to break out the fuchikomas!


EOF



--
________________  ___    ___  ________________
\_________      \ \__\__/__/ /      _________/    Our Lady of the Blessed
    \________    \__~o\/o~__/    ________/    Acceleration, guide my throttle
        \____________\  /____________/      and grant me traction, give me my
          A  A  R  D  ||  V  A  R  K     daily kick in the ass! VROOOOOOOOOM!



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